Better Than It Seems

Better Than It Seems

You knew reading about the Minnesota school murders that the shooter's taste in music would come up (he liked metal, hated rap), although this kid's family life was so plainly horrifying the pop culture bogeyman only made a brief appearance. The power of records to fuel violence is a periodic subject of debate and the "yay" camp usually winds up looking like idiots. Their most persuasive argument in the end is that aesthetic swords cut both ways and the energy of inspiration can flow in either direction.

I am completely in awe of music's ability to raise me above a miserable situation, and lately I've been thinking about sound in highly utilitarian terms. Here's what's been going on: I work as a paralegal and in the last few months some weird managerial imbalance has set in causing the workload to increase sharply. My days alternate between grinding tedium and pants-shitting panic as we struggle to keep from missing deadlines and falling further behind. I suck down endless cups of black coffee to stay focused on what has to be done, and when I get home at night I can feel the stress all through my body, a tension that doesn't dissipate until I fall asleep.

Though people talk about records getting them through breakups and offering comfort during grief, music doesn't usually occur to me when I'm overwhelmed with sadness. At these times records can seem superfluous, a meaningless background buzz that fails to distract from the heavy thing sitting in the center of the world. But this job problem is something else. During periods of overwork and mondo stress, music is absolutely crucial for pulling my brain out of its scrambled fight-or-flight state. As I walk away from the office up the hill to the bus stop, too often well after dark, I listen to music and am immediately reminded of the larger, deeper, and more profound things that make it worth getting up every morning.

The final two tracks on Keith Whitman's Multiples, Parts 1 and 2 of "Stereo Music for Acoustic Guitar, Buchla Music Box 100, Hewlett Packard Model 236 Oscillator, Electric Guitar and Computer", are one sort of signpost. The cool and removed repetition of the acoustic guitar on "Part 1" lowers me slowly into the chirpy Takemuraesque electronics of "Part 2", which is like a cave chamber stuffed with gold treasure. Under the stars in the empty commercial zone, Whitman's spacious sound, so precise and ordered until the vectors curve and bind together into a sparkling heap of pure sound, makes me think of the bedrock mathematics of the universe, where Zen meets experimental physics and beauty can be found in every pattern.

Whitman's music is for the mind, but it's also important after a day in front of a computer to reconnect with the physical world. Two records, Otha Turner and the Afrossippi Allstars and Konono No. 1's Congotronics, send a wakeup jolt through me every time I put them on. Both come from groups of people doing things live with their hands and mouths, where the sound becomes a byproduct of movement rather than an idea dreamed up in a studio.

Konono No. 1's Congotronics has deservedly been getting attention with its sonically inventive take on percussion-heavy trance music. The first time I heard it I had a visceral experience akin to early moviegoers ducking to avoid an oncoming train; it was the sort of record that immediately made whatever else I was listening to sound silly. The Otha Turner release combines the late fife player's Rising Star Fife and Drum Band with Senegalese musicians, drawing links between slide guitar and kora, between the martial Civil War snare and the sabar. When the job freaks me out, "Shimmy She Wobble" sets me straight.

Thinking back to when I first used music as a tool, treated a song like a blade of grass to stick into a hill of termites, I'm remembering Michigan in the winter of 1982. That year was particularly cold and miserable, although maybe it just felt that way because I felt (again) constantly felt on the verge of flunking out of school. Every morning I'd be looking out the front window at the blinding whiteness of the season, waiting for the brown Chevy Vega driven by my best friend's older sister to take me somewhere I didn't want to go.

Climbing inside the car it was warm enough that I'd have to unbutton my coat. My friend and his sister would have the radio going on the same channel, WMMQ-FM. I don't remember the hook, "today's hit music" or or something like it, which in 1982 meant they'd play a certain amount of what would now be called classic rock, along with the pop hits that have now entered the 80s canon. Sheena Easton's "Morning Train" and Kim Carnes' "Bette Davis Eyes" stand out, but I also remember a smattering of songs that were a year or two older: Zeppelin's "All of My Love," John Lennon's "(Just Like) Starting Over", Styx's "The Best of Times."

One song from this era, which I heard regularly in that Vega on the way to school, still pulls at me like a beam from a lighthouse. Even now, as it sits on my iPod, a steady fixture as I rotate other favorites in and out, it has a strange hold on me. It is perhaps the least hip song imaginable, never discussed, a song that at the time was probably considered an overblown, derivative, and adolescent chunk of ear candy. As someone who has over the years had a generous handful of people give me money so I would share with others my opinion on music, I am completely unwilling and unable to defend this song as piece of art. But fuck it: I was 12 years old and miserable, the song was Triumph's "Magic Power", and brother, it sounds even better to me today than it did then. Rik Emmett told me "The world is full of compromise, infinite red tape/ But the music's got the magic, it's your one chance for escape" and goddamn if he wasn't right!